Mobile networks may support various devices that may operate according to vastly different characteristics or requirements. Smartphones or similar devices may receive high data rates and download large amounts of data while Machine Type Communication (MTC) devices may transmit or receive far less data. The number of MTC devices is expected to explode to tens of billions of devices over the next decade. MTC devices may have different requirements than other 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) user equipment (UE) in terms of optional feature support, traffic characteristic support, access priority, congestion management, ratio of signaling to user plane traffic, etc. Many MTC devices generate very low user plane traffic on the network and many such MTC devices can be considered as low access priority as defined in 3GPP Rel-10 specifications.
Even if the MTC devices use low priority access and send only small amount of data, the sheer increase in the number of MTC devices transmitting the data through Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks has the potential to overload the radio access network and/or core network of the LTE networks. Moreover, certain MTC devices may not be able to charge their batteries, making it desirable for these MTC devices to save battery power.
It would thus be desirable to improve power consumption of UEs, especially MTC devices.